No abstract

The number of disabled students is rapidly increasing worldwide, but many schools and universities have failed to keep up with their learning needs. Consequently, large numbers of disabled students are dropping out of school or university. Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) contain several relevant features, including the possibility of reusing and remixing, which have led researchers to consider using OER and OEP to facilitate meeting the needs of disabled and functional-diverse students in order to increase their accessibility and e-inclusion capabilities in educational settings. The very limited research to date, however, has provided a limited holistic understanding of accessibility within OER and OEP in order to aid researchers in pursuing future directions in this field. Therefore, this paper systematically reviewed 31 papers to provide insights about functional diversity within OER and OEP. The results obtained highlighted that accessibility is still in its infancy within OER and that researchers should focus more on considering the four accessibility principlesperceivable, operable, understandable and robustwhen providing OER. Additionally, while several researchers have focused on several issues related to accessibility within OER, limited focus has been given to assistive technologies using OER. Finally, this paper provides several recommendations to increase accessibility within OER and help design more accessible OER for students with functional diversity.

While several studies were conducted to investigate the current state of Open Educational Resources (OER) in several regions (e.g., Europe, America, Middle East and MENA), to the best of our knowledge, no study was conducted to cover the entire Arab region, specifically the twenty-two Arab countries. Therefore, to identify the OER gap in this region and then provide recommendations to facilitate OER adoption, this study investigates the current state of OER in the Arab region, specifically in twenty-two Arab countries. The obtained results showed that the OER progress is unbalanced within the Arab countries. Interestingly, several Arab countries are still lack behind when it comes to the application of OER in universities and schools. Finally, several recommendations are identified to several stakeholders, including policy makers and educators, to achieve social justice and facilitate the adoption and use of OER in the Arab region.